A Catholic priest responds to queries on faith, the Bible, religion, Catholic practice, etc. posed by readers.
What he doesn't know, he makes up.

Monday, December 24, 2012

Why aren't our plans working? -- part 2

Continued from last week….

Last time I wrote, Dear Frieda, I said I would address the central problem as I see it: the Eucharist, or as most of us old people call it, going to Mass on Sunday. We are propping up a system of religious education that was designed for a culture that is as dead as a plate of pickled herring, a system that the progressive wing of the Catholic Church helped kill. Speaking of pickled, I must admit that I was a committed member of that progressive wing in my youth. I formally quit the “movement” in my junior year of college when the peace committee broke up in a big fight during peace week. Even though my official membership in the silliness of the 60's was not long, it took me decades to find the moral courage to become as wildly politically incorrect as I now am. When I accuse a certain segment of the Church and the society of killing the culture and weakening the faith; I am talking about me. Enough of breast beating. I will return to chest thumping.

For one thousand years and more, the culture of the West had been nourished philosophically, artistically and esthetically by the Roman liturgy. Even the weak gender identity of the male of the species had been propped up by the Liturgy and the notion of a holy and sacrificial priestly caste. (You mean clericalism? Yes. I do. We need it. Women come by holiness and maturity a lot more easily than men. Women used to be grown-ups. Men have never been grown-ups unless you give them an important responsibility, like fatherhood or ordination. Just think about male hobbies like Ice Fishing and belching contests.) Where was I before the last digression? Oh, yes. The liturgy. The Roman liturgy, the sacrifice of the Mass produced the great visual art, the great music, the great architecture and the philosophical coherence of the culture. It was obscure in its secrecy and strange in its language. The celebrant mumbled in a language that only smart people knew. If you wanted to understand it and participate you had to actually learn something. You had to stretch yourself intellectually and if you couldn’t, you had to trust those who could. The very obscurity and art of the liturgy gave people a window into a world that otherwise would have been denied them.

Then, over night, Palestrina was replaced with polka music, Zurburan and El Greco were replaced with Burlap Banners and Corita Kent. The great soaring Cathedrals, the palaces of the poor in which any beggar was welcome, where the poorest of the poor could taste art and music, and probably get a meal afterwards in the convent soup kitchen, these were replaced by space ships from the Planet Ugly. Why did it happen? I have written elsewhere that the wars resulting from the reformation break up of Christendom started the car rolling down the cliff, but the sixties were definitely the point the car went into the ravine.

What did it? Democracy. Democracy had defeated Hitler. America was a democracy. America was good. The stuffy monarchies of the past were bad. Tyranny must go! The papacy was a monarchy. Thank God for the Council! (At least the shallow interpretation of the Council presented in most institutions of learning.) Now we would vote on the truth just like our American Protestant neighbors, the Congregationalists. We were living in an illusion. America was not and is not a democracy. A very small group of very wealthy secularists tells us what to think, what to wear, whom to love and how to vote. They do so by means of the television that sits in every room of our house. The country used to be ruled by a small group of wealthy secularists. The country is now ruled by a small group of wealthy secularist who have control of the media. I call them the Mediacracy (accent third syllable.)

The guiding lights of liturgical renewal in the noble pursuit of heroic democracy and freedom of conscience decided
that the moral thing to do was to play to the lowest common
denominator, hence the liturgy of the New Church which we are busy
singing into being. (Cf. Do a web search for “Liturgical Abuse: Puppets (WCCTA 2008)”

- Please, I implore you to look at this. You’ll totally platz. I am not making this stuff up.) The liturgy was the lifeblood of the culture. It was hijacked and became the plaything of artistic wannabe’s in the sixties. In the above mentioned video, with its liturgical dances and giant papier mache puppets celebrating Mass, you see the quintessential stupidity of the whole project. Everyone’s an artist, everyone’s a celebrant, everyone’s entertained. Democracy. Christ the King becomes Christ the Sub-committee Chairperson. The only thing the perpetrators in the video clip were afraid to do was have a priestess as the main celebrant. The old fellow with the chasuble wanders around in the video like some lost child, while liturgical dancers female, and possibly male, cavort about sprinkling holy water on the assembled young liberals most of whom seen to be in their 70's. It is very entertaining if you were in college in the sixties. It is as boring as mud if you are young in 2012.

All that new liturgical music is 50 years old. It is as about as current as disco music. It might be delightful nostalgia, but it isn’t the eternal Sacrifice of Calvary. “But,” the young octogenarian liberals respond, “the Church used to be so dreary, so morbid, all that thinking about death.” We abandoned the black vestments and the Dies Irae, and replaced them with more upbeat things like white vestments and happy hymns like “On Beagles Wings” and “Be Not A Noodge.” “Dies Irae” was “Be Afraid, Be very Afraid!!”

Maybe we shouldn’t be afraid. Maybe the Bible, the big book on the coffee table, is wrong when it says that “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.” (Proverbs 9:10) Well, we may longer be afraid, but we are also not entertained. There are a lot better things to do on a Sunday morning than watch a bunch of aging ex nuns dancing around in giant paper mache masks sprinkling Holy Water on aging liberals by means of small pieces of shrubbery. The liturgy was scary with its smoke and candles and strange gestures and solemn chanting in a strange language. God was scary. Life was scary. God and Mass are no longer scary, but life on Planet Earth gets scarier and scarier. At the Mass, we no longer propose reasonable answers to the difficult questions. We propose a kind of spiritual entertainment, a sort of community gathering, salvation by a positive mental attitude. There really is no reason to go to Mass on Sunday, unless there is nothing better to do. And believe me, there is always something better to do. That something is high school sports.

High school sports is one of the greatest enemy of Catholicism and of Catholic schools. I have elsewhere said that the sign of successful Catholic educational system is an adolescent who goes to church on Sunday by himself in July when his parents are out of town. This happens with about .0001 percent of Catholic adolescents. (I made that statistic up, but I bet the real figure is not much different. Somebody, please prove me wrong.) Most parents give themselves and their children a dispensation from church if there is a BIG GAME. Or a medium game. Or just an optional practice. The big, medium or optional sporting event is far more interesting than a bunch of old liberals cavorting about in what passes for liturgical dance. In fact the liturgical dance just gets downright embarrassing to a normal adolescent male when a 50 year old, overweight, balding man dances around him clad in ill fitting white pants sprinkling him with heaven knows what.(Cf. Afore mentioned video.) Better to be on a practice field throwing some kind of ball around. We old people who find this stuff meaningful have no idea how boring it is to our tech savvy, media addicted grandchildren. The liturgy which acknowledges and answers the great questions about death, judgement, heaven and hell has meaning. The liturgy as we now perceive it answers these great question with coffee and doughnuts and bad art.

To be Catholic is to go to Mass. It is the sacrifice by which we acknowledge our real condition as sinners who will die. At Mass, we commit ourselves to God’s offer of forgiveness and eternal life. This is true of the Mass in all its valid forms, Tridentine, Novus Ordo and all. Mass as entertainment has no power to move men’s souls. It merely moves their emotions. A good Bears-Packers games is much better at moving the emotions. So why bother to go to Mass? After all, all dogs go to heaven, that is, if there is a
heaven. God is too nice to send even the Chihuahuas to hell.

The first Christians believed the Mass was the Messianic sacrifice.
The Hebrew sages believed that the messiah would do away with all the
sacrifices of the Law, except for the “Todah” sacrifice, the Thanksgiving
Sacrifice, that is. The Thanksgiving Sacrifice was offered when a person had
been delivered from death and danger, not when a person wanted to be mildly
entertained. Thanksgiving is Todah in Hebrew. It is Eucharist in Greek. The
reason that the first Christians celebrated the Eucharist was that they had
been delivered from certain death. Sometimes it seems the modern liturgist
wants to distract the believer from the prospect of mortality. The messianic Thanksgiving
sacrifice was about life and death. The liberal liturgy is about political
correctness and good times. It is irrelevant to modern people who can find more
efficient ways to distract themselves.

What has this to do with our attempts to put Catholic parishes and
Catholic schools on a sound economic footing? Simply this: If one does not go to Mass, one is not
a Catholic (Catechism of the Catholic Church #2042 and Canon Law # 1247) Mass defines
the Catholic. We have schools that present no real reason to go to Mass except
that there is a tuition discount. Done with school, done with Mass seems to be
the motto of the Catholic school graduate of today. In the current muddle we
have schools that simply don’t produce Catholics, et ergo, they are not
Catholic schools. We are bleeding money to pay for private schools that produce
secular humanists at reasonable rates. I know people who would open up their mattresses
in a minute to have Catholic schools. They aren’t quite as interested in what
we have going now.

5 comments:

Father, you made me replace the batteries in my sarcasm meter twice, but I greatly appreciate your dissertation on the devolution of the liturgy. Although I was born as Vatican II was nearing its end, and never experiencing the Tridentine Mass until about 12 years ago at the parish of St. Agnes in Baton Rouge, LA on Christmas Day (even my video-game-addled, sugar-fueled kids recognized the solemnity and responded in kind), I suffered through the years of felt banners and folk music (not all of which was bad), and eventually dropped out in college only to return several years later because of no greater reason than my mother invited me to go to Mass with her and my father (the Lord doesn't need flashy supernatural events to perform miracles). Since then I have come to realize that while I was an enthusiastic Catholic growing up, I had missed so much of the richness of the Church and Her traditions (of which now I am only scratching the surface), as well as the pure intellectual challenge and resulting enrichment of Catholic teaching, but I am now doing what I can to make up for lost time and can only hope and pray that some of this rubs off on my children.

Fortunately, I am a member of a most vibrant parish, St. John the Apostle in Leesburg, VA, that is dedicated to true and proper Catholicism, led by a God-fearing and God-loving pastor who, with the enormous help of the Holy Spirit, inspired and led us to build a beautiful, new but traditional-styled church after tossing out the previous plans for a building that resembled the unfortunate offspring of a steakhouse and a branch bank.

(http://www.saintjohnleesburg.org/)

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/conceptjunkie/sets/72157630907181302/)

We even have the Tridentine Mass twice a month at the little chapel (the old St. John's which we outgrow more than 20 years ago) where I am honored to sing several times a year with the Schola (we're not great, but we practice a lot).

The Church will survive its derailing in the wake of Vatican II, and the new generation is rediscovering the beauty and power of Tradition and abandoning all the novelty you so entertainingly skewered. It may take more decades, what with the total collapse of our society's morals, but as with every crisis, Christ's church will eventually come roaring back more energized and renewed as ever to be the only salt of the earth that truly gives life any lasting flavor.

Rev. Know-it-all

About Me

Rev. Know-it-all is the alter ego of Fr. Richard Simon, Pastor of St. Lambert Parish, Skokie, IL.
Now a regular host of Relevant Radio's "Fr. Simon Says", Fr. Simon spent over 20 years "...teaching dead languages to comatose seminarians."
Credits: The Reverend Know-It-All is a parody of Mr. Know-It-All, the alter ego of Bullwinkle J. Moose, a carton character created by Jay Ward (1920-1989).